Poland Rules Out Japan-Style Nuclear Crisis

Remains of the nuclear power plant in Zarnowiec, Poland. This was the location for the first Polish nuclear power plant, but construction was stopped in 1990 due to protests of the local population.

The nuclear emergency currently gripping Japan would not happen in Poland, due to its location and the advanced design of the nuclear power plants Poland plans to build, the country’s Economy Ministry said. The country continues to plan its first nuclear power plant.

Poland plans to build two nuclear power plants, each with a 3,000 megawatt capacity, as part of a strategy to diversity the country’s energy sources away from coal and an over-reliance on natural gas from Russia.

However, nuclear programs across the globe have been called into question as a result of the stream of nuclear emergencies declared in Japan since Friday’s earthquake.

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German officials in the states of Brandenburg and Berlin have called on Poland to cancel its planned nuclear power plant, daily Gazeta Wyborcza reported Wednesday, without citing a source. Poland is still determined to implement its nuclear energy program, the country’s nuclear energy plenipotentiary Hanna Trojanowska was quoted as saying by the daily.

Poland’s communist-era government began construction of a nuclear power plant in the 1980s, but the project was deeply unpopular, especially after the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, and was never completed.

The Polish government put state-controlled power group PGE Polska Grupa Energetyczna SA in charge of the development of nuclear power in Poland, together with international partners.

Comments (5 of 6)

I agree to your point. Still, it is not the tremble of the M9 mega-quake (i.e. a type of earthquake due to massive dynamics of lithospheres) but the subsequent mega-tsunami that damaged the plants. The reactors had been safely stopped without any damage or failure by the time the tsunami hit. Actually, the accident occurred when the millennium-class-tsunami drenched the supplementary diesel generators to keep operating the fuel-rod cooling systems and washed off all the supplementary appliances and the heavy-oil tanks stored just at the port, which had been expected to safely resist a large few-metre-high tsunami, in front of the reactors.

Therefore, the question about the probability of a mega-tsunami is also appliable to Italy.

In any case, it may be safer to build nuclear power plants by an ever-calm sea like the Baltic, as the guys at Fukushima are trying to cool the rods by using seawater this time as the last resort. Even though the local probability of a mega-tsunami was practically zero, the probability of a failure of cooling system due to other reasons such as human error, war and terrorism could still be at a meaningful level. ‘Sea’ – calm one as a matter of course – might be an important factor as a safety net.

Regards,
Jan

6:52 pm March 16, 2011

Lukasz wrote:

I think Poland should build nuclear power plants at less four of them. Nuclear power plant provides clean energy and safe energy. Poland depends mostly on coal but coal is running out and the other option is to build the nuclear power plants. Why should Poland an independent country buy energy from Russia or Germany when they could have their own. In Japan the power plants did not fail because of bad design but because a huge tsunami that came and washed every thing away unlike in Ukraine in the 80's. Media is making nuclear power look bad, but if you eliminate nuclear power then your electric bill could go from $50 to $500 just an example. If Germany is so smart and are asking Poland not to build the plants then they should firs eliminate all theirs and start using coal and we will see what will happen. I fully support Nuclear Power and I thing most countries should build theirs.

3:52 pm March 16, 2011

Hevelius wrote:

It's the right decision. As Jan states, Poland is not an earthquake zone and is as likely to experience a tsunami or 9.0 earthquake as to be hit by a giant asteroid.

Building nuclear power plants is naturally oligopolist, since it requires immense resources of capital and expertise (as well as state approval and cooperation at a deep level). In fact, there is one japanese company which has a monopoly on producing the steel structures used for containment vessels - no other company has the expertise to do it.

In general the policy of Japanese MITI and MOF planners has been to foster the creation of companies with natural monopolies, producing goods which are so capital intensive (and with domain specific expertise) that the costs of entering the market are prohibitive to newcomers. As industrial policy goes, I can think of worse ones.

2:04 pm March 16, 2011

alexbusybee wrote:

Hysteria will always be hysteria. I'd believe the critics - if Poland were situated near a tectonic fault-line -such as Italy.

8:39 am March 16, 2011

Jan wrote:

I forgot to note: Please try for yourself to find which companies built the Japanese power plant in question. It's actually two Japanese companies and one American company. When you watch TV and read newspapers please recall this request.

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